


A Handful of Dust

by silverlake7169



Category: True Detective
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Psychological Trauma, Psychosis
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-06-07
Packaged: 2018-01-16 03:29:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1330246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverlake7169/pseuds/silverlake7169
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Rust is suspended for running his own investigation, he goes missing. Despite their rift, Marty can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [a prompt](http://truedetectivekm.livejournal.com/566.html?thread=4662#t4662) over at the True Detective kink meme.

Even when he’s gone, Rust Cohle is the bane of Marty’s existence.

It’s been six weeks since he last saw those flint eyes and hard angles, felt the crunch of bone under his knuckle, and his former partner’s face is all he can see when he closes his eyes.

The phone call he gets from Maggie, thirty-seven days after Rust vanishes off the face of the earth, doesn’t help.

“You shouldn’t hold it against him,” is what she says first.

“How’s that?”

“It was my doing. Not all the mechanics, but the… It would never have happened, if I hadn’t pushed. I showed up at his door and I threw myself on him and wouldn’t take no. And he was real drunk.”

“What the fuck are… Why are you saying this?”

“I’m just telling you the truth, Marty. I need to. It’s been eating at me, this... You think you know what kind of a situation this was, and it wasn’t that. He didn’t want it, not for a long while.”

His nails are digging hard into his own palm.

“Why you trying to make out like Rust was this poor innocent bystander? What’s your angle? Like you made the first move, and you want me to know it–”

“It’s not just that. I made the first, second, third move. I wanted him. And I wanted you to _hurt_. I’m not saying don't blame him, but it was… He was pretty torn up about it. Screamed at me. He knew why I’d come to him, knew it’d destroy the two of you.”

He wants to hang up the phone.

“You could have fucked anyone, Maggie. Anyone you wanted, anyone but him.”

“I don’t regret hurting you. You deserved it, God knows. But him… he’s broken. Twisted up, you know? I’d felt the cracks in him before, knew where they were, knew where to push. His loneliness seeping out of him like scent. And the way the two of you clung onto each other…”

“What the hell are you implying?”

“You just said it,” she barrels on, voice quaking. “It wasn't about me. I could have lived with that, maybe. But I knew me being with someone else, just anyone, wasn’t gonna do it. You’d have made all the right noises but it wouldn’t really touch you, because you didn’t really care. You cared about appearances, sure, you wanted to keep me on side, but you didn’t really put much thought into who I gave my body to.”

“You can’t seriously think this–”

“I wasn’t your obsession. Not anymore. You’ve always needed an object, Marty, and it’s been too long since I was it. Lisa sure was, I knew that from the things she told me, and last month it suddenly struck me it’s Rust, now. And I felt… I felt crazy, for not having seen it sooner.”

“Rust was my goddamned partner, Maggie. Come on.”

He feels weak, and slow, and he recognises the feeling from the day he’d arrived home to find that suitcase and that letter in ’95. Like he’s been found out.

“I’m not arguing it with you. I’m only telling you all this because Rust’s never been anything but good to me, and what I said to you that night makes him out to be worse than he is. And I want him to be alright, much as possible for a man like him.”

“Well, that’s swell. I figure you know by now he quit six weeks back, ergo he ain’t my partner any more, ergo I’m no longer obligated to give a shit.”

“His place is empty. His stuff’s all still there, but nothing’s been moved for weeks.”

“And you would know this because…”

He hears her sigh, can picture her mouth and her skin, the gentle downward swell of breath. And for a second he feels loss so intensely he can’t breathe.

“I went to check up on him. Figured the two of you’d come to blows. His door was unlocked, place was empty. This was almost three weeks back, and nothing’s moved, not an inch. His car’s been gone the whole time.”

There’s a weight in his stomach, and it’s duller and deeper than loss. Something about this does not feel right.

“Marty? You there?” she asks, after what must have been too long.

“Yeah,” he answers, and stares down at the biro he’s been clutching unconsciously, the memo pad beneath it. He’s drawn a spiral.

“You figure he’s just left town?”

Her tone is hopeful, edgy.

“Not exactly.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I've effectively taken Rust's investigation from 2012 and transplanted it into 2002, editing it to reflect the evidence he had at that point.

He’d have sworn it wasn’t possible, but Rust’s apartment has actually gotten bleaker. 

The lighting’s out, and after trying the switch twice he figures the electricity’s disconnected. The darkness isn’t the improvement he’d have expected; it hides none of what makes the place grim and in the half-moonlight it looks emptier than ever, but for the far wall.

Crime scene photographs, typed notes, sketches and coloured pins are arranged in something like a collage underneath three scrawled headings:“YELLOW KING”, “SCARS” and “CARCOSA”.

Looking at them sends a thrill of something through Marty, and a big part of him wants to turn the fuck around and leave everything about this place behind forever. Fuck Rust. Fuck this.

But the words have buried themselves somewhere deep in him, or maybe re-emerged from where they’ve lain for years. And he’s known from the start Rust was grasping at more than straws. 

So what the hell has he gotten himself into?

He spends several minutes poring over the wall, trying to make sense of the patterns, but without Rust here to narrate the thing might as well be written in Swahili. The “green-eared spaghetti monster” artist impression, photographs of Dora Lange, Marie Fontenot, those twig latticeworks that still give him the creeps even in two dimensions. More photos from a house he doesn’t recognize. 

His eyes fall to the ledger, that ridiculous A4 notebook that got Rust the taxman nickname. It’s been tossed aside like he was in a hurry, standing out among otherwise organized piles. 

Its pages read like the illustrated guide to a man’s descent into crazy. The beginning’s logical enough – crime scene sketches, names and dates jotted in hasty rows and columns, a lot of them relating to the school closures. Every page is slightly more crowded than the last, like Rust’s thoughts were coming too fast and dense to straighten out any more. 

He reaches a page that’s out-and-out gibberish, a mass of black ink like a child’s drawing of a bird’s nest. There’s writing in there, one sentence written on top of another on top of another, layered over and over until it’s all illegible. 

It reads like the ramblings of a madman, and he thinks how nobody else can ever find this because Rust will end up back on the psych ward, and maybe for good this time.

Assuming he hasn’t already.

Assuming he doesn’t belong there.

But the memory of Rust comes back to him too sharp to ignore, clear-eyed and certain. He’d sure become a self-righteous piece of shit, but he was not crazy. Not even close. And hard though Marty’s tried to put all of the fucking theories out of his head, everything he’d said about Tuttle and the task force and Wellspring, it hasn't quite stuck. 

The way Salter suspended Rust rankled with him at the time – Speece had a hand in it, he’d wager, maybe even Tuttle himself – and with his partner six weeks gone it feels suddenly a whole lot shittier. 

As he stands, something crunches under his foot. A ballpoint pen. 

Hold it.

The ledger has fallen open at its midpoint; a page has been ripped out, leaving a jagged remainder at the spine. 

“Shit,” he mutters, looking harder at the first page remaining. This would be luck beyond what he’s come to expect. 

He rummages in the drawers until a pencil emerges, slants it just so and slicks a layer of grey onto the paper. And sure enough, there are white lines visible, white lines spelling out an address and coordinates. 

None of it is familiar to him but the name: Childress, William. 

As he half-runs back to his car with the ledger tucked under his arm, his other hand moves unconsciously to his gun. 

*~*

The minute he reaches the house, the pit in his stomach deepens. 

Everything in him is saying turn the car around, book it the fuck out of here and come back with backup. He doesn’t know what it is about the place – the wildly overgrown back yard, the porch door hanging half off its hinges, the way the black window-frames sit against white slats. Wrong.

It takes seven rounds of knocking for the door to finally open, bouncing on its rusty chain. 

A woman, he figures late forties but it’s hard to be sure under the matted hair. She stares at him like he’s an apparition.

“Afternoon, ma’am, I’m awful sorry to trouble you,” he begins, laying the gee-golly on thick. “I’m a realtor, been pricing up a property just west of here, and I’ve got myself well and truly lost on these back roads.”

Through the narrow gap above her shoulder, he sees chaos. 

“Is there any chance I could use your phone? My cell’s been getting nothing for miles, and my wife’s gonna be fretting.”

Papers, clothes, books litter the floor, climb half up the walls like creepers. The shadows are jagged, hiding more.

“We don’t have no phone, mister. My daddy never did get round to replacing the old one.”

“You live here with your father?”

She eyes him, and he jams a foot pre-emptively into the gap between door and frame.

“Is your father home, ma’am?”

“I think you should go now–”

He shoves his left shoulder into the gap, smiles wide and firm.

“Where is William Childress?” he asks, rapidly losing the will to be subtle. She blinks her big glazed eyes at him and he repeats, louder, “Where is William Childress, ma’am?”

“He’s not home, mister. Out painting.”

“Your family business, that’s Childress & Sons?” Something from Rust’s notes has come back to him.

She stares at him like she knows she’s slipped up, and while she’s still trying to figure where he shoves his way in, and nothing he sees inside makes him any less sure or less sick. 

After he’s cleared the house he returns, lets her see his gun because he does not have time for this. 

“You tell me. Has a man come here these past few weeks, tall, rangy, short hair, eyes like burning?”

She nods, smiling. 

“Where is he? When was he here?”

“He’s always been here.”

The smile fades real fucking fast as Marty pushes her hard into the wall, blood pounding against his eardrum.

“The little priest who came to die with us,” she murmurs, half singsong. “They usually get brung, but he came here on his own two feet–”

“Where the fuck is he?” 

“He’s in the kingdom, with him.”

“Show me.”

“Carcosa,” and she points directly out the front door and suddenly, he understands. Ties her up, hands shaking with each knot, can’t form words because every question he wants to ask has an answer he can’t bear. _Rust._


	3. Chapter 3

Outside, he pauses only long enough to dial the station with shaking hands, takes a moment to thank God when he gets Lutz. Tells him to get the fuck down here with backup. 

He passes a wall that bears a life-size portrait of a man, crowned in antlers, surrounded by black stars and stick sculptures. He moves through an archway, advances into darkness, his guts screaming at him to turn back. 

The place looks old, 19th century at least, a stone fort formed of interweaving tunnels and seemingly endless doorways. Carcosa. 

Branches line the place, criss-crossing every which way, and he damn near jumps when he rounds a corner and faces a twig sculpture that’s bigger than him, blown up like in a circus funhouse mirror.

More of them await and he tries not to look, pushing forward with no real idea of where he’s going, gun pointed vainly in the darkness. There are figures in the branches, and he doesn’t stop to see them. 

A huge pile of children’s clothes sits in the corner of one room and he can’t not see this. Steels himself, making a mental note of the location.

Then. A tunnel formed of branches leading, like a pathway. To.

“Jesus.”

He steps forward, and what he sees sends a hard jolt through him. Words die in his throat.

Rust, naked and bound at the hands and feet to a stone table, his skin a mess of scars and ink, symbols half-hidden by dried blood. 

What stands out plain as day, as Marty draws closer on numb legs, is the spiral cut deep into his left side. He can’t see life.

“No, Rust–”

The wind’s knocked out of him in a beat, and the younger Childress is on him, wielding a knife and staring.

Hadn't counted on the son. He’s large, uncoordinated, more flesh than muscle but he’s still got a few dozen pounds on Marty. Pinned beneath him, it’s all he can do to grapple and keep the knife upward. 

Childress slams his head hard into the floor once and he tries to focus through the roar of pain, tasting his own blood. Kicks out hard, barely connecting, losing his grip.

“The disc and the loop will let go,” Childress is saying, “the loop never ends but you will be blessed.”

He feels slicing beneath his jawbone, the blade missing his carotid by inches and as pure adrenalin floods him he snaps Childress’s raised arm backward, feels it break. 

The knife clatters down, and three bullets in Childress’s head cut his scream short. 

He staggers upright and forward, head spinning, vision graying at the edges, and steadies himself for a second against the stone. There’s blood trickling from his jaw, knows his head is bleeding too.

“Rust.”

His eyes are closed, skin clammy to Marty’s touch as he presses two fingers against his pulse point and finds a beat, slow but steady. 

“Okay, Rust, come on. Rust,” he’s holding Rust’s face in both his hands and keeps saying his name, over and over and over until his eyes open. “Hey.”

Blank gaze, staring like open windows.

“Rust, it’s me. Hey.”

Rust’s eyes go suddenly wide like he’s seen a ghost and Marty spins on his heel, gun cocked, sure there’s someone behind him. But the place is empty.

“Get out, go, go,” Rust is saying, voice low and resigned. “Before he comes back, you got time. You can’t be here. Laws of this place won’t allow it.”

Focus.

He casts his eyes around the place for something sharp, anything but Childress’s knife, and it’s easy to find. A rag is laid out on the floor not two feet from them, smudged brown and red and atop it are three blades, different sizes, each rusty. The largest is bloodstained.

Ignoring the lurch of his stomach, he grabs the middle-sized blade – DNA evidence on the large one will be needed – and begins hacking at the ropes binding Rust’s wrists and hands.

“Talk to me,” he murmurs as he cuts, but Rust’s eyes are glazed over again and Marty figures for now, he’s better off out of it. 

He’s taking in the cuts on Rust’s body, trying to ignore the throbbing at the back of his skull. Most aren’t fresh, but there’s a star cut into his shoulder that’s still bleeding, and at least one of the healing cuts is infected.

Finally the ropes give, and he gets an arm under Rust’s shoulders, drags him upright.

“Can you walk?”

Nothing. 

“Rust. Hey.” He looks hard at Rust’s eyes, his pupils dilated. “They put you on something?”

Yeah. Something. LSD and meth on the bodies, he figures Rust is doped up along similar lines. 

He slaps him hard across the face on impulse, trying to snap him out of it, regrets it straight off as Rust recoils. Fuck.

“Rust, it’s me. It’s Marty. Just trying to get your attention,” and a tiny crazy laugh escapes on his exhale. “We gotta get out of here.”

“Can’t leave. Ain’t nobody leaves this place,” Rust mutters, “and you know that more than most, you–“

And he stops short, staring as Marty grips his head in place and forces him to look. Really look. 

“Marty…” He comprehends, voice shaking.

“About fucking time,” Marty breathes, and he’s not sure if he means Rust, or him, or both. _How long has Rust been here?_

“You’re bleeding.” He can feel it drying sticky on his neck, wound still pulsing. 

“No shit. You too. Let’s get out of here, alright?”

It takes several minutes to get Rust close to upright, adrenalin still pushing Marty on though the growing heaviness in his limbs. And they go.

Rust leans harder on him as they pass Childress’s body, bloodstain flourishing around his head like a crown.

Outside on the dirt, he covers Rust with his jacket and waits. Doesn’t let the blackness take him until he hears sirens.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for the comments - every one of them is hugely appreciated!

He wakes up with staples in his head and thick waxen bandages on his neck, and has to ask three different nurses how long he’s been under.

Nine hours. He’d been hit harder in the head than he realised.

“They were gonna test you for brain damage,” Lutz opens, when he visits later that night, “but they couldn’t tell the difference from your norm, so…”

“Fuck you. What happened out there?”

“It’s a mess. Forensics is there now. They think there’s, uh… there’s a lot. They’re running DNA on the clothes recovered from the tunnels, but there’s already enough evidence to convict. Haven’t tracked down the father yet.”

“How’s Rust?” 

“Better off than you, surface-wise. Lot of cuts, some of ‘em shallow, some not. Mostly healed.”

“Is anyone with him?”

Dumb question, he figures. Like anybody but him’s going to volunteer to sit with Rust Cohle.

Lutz shakes his head. 

“He’s going in for a psych eval in the morning. Sounds like he was held there for about three weeks, so uh… There’s a procedure, I guess.”

He was tortured, is what this shitty code is spelling out. Cuts and then some, most likely. Wasn’t killed like the girls, but was he used like them? 

Marty closes his eyes, too nauseous to stand the light. 

“Find out when I can see him.”

*~*

They keep him in overnight for observation. He sleeps in uneasy fits and snippets, too much dancing behind his closed eyelids. 

When he wakes up from what feels like a decent stretch of actual sleep, Maggie is there, dawn light slicking her hair gold at the surface. 

“This gonna happen every time I give you a phone call?” she says, trying for a smile. “Christ, Marty.”

“You didn’t count on this?”

“I should’ve. I counted on something dark, though. Way his place was left, all that on the wall...”

“If you hadn’t called, he’d still be in there.”

“I know it.”

“You been in to see him?”

She twitches up her jaw for a second, like she’s flinching.

“I thought about it a few times. Didn’t want to agitate him any more.”

“He’s agitated?”

Drugs have worn off by now, Marty figures, and fuck what a comedown.

“The tox report hasn’t come back yet, so–”

“Meth, LSD. That’s what, uh… that’s what they found on Dora Lange and the other bodies. That’s what they used.”

He can’t hold down the shaking in his voice. Maggie reaches out a hand and stops just short of his, her fingers bunching the blanket. 

“You want to see him? Before he goes over to psych?”

For the six weeks Rust’s been gone, thoughts of him and Maggie have swarmed in Marty’s head like roaches, burrowing into his every impulse, making him sick. 

Now, looking at her, thinking of Rust, the thought has no weight. It’s an image and that’s all. Crazy how a mind can change, like water under a different sky.

“Yeah.”

Rust looks nothing close to agitated when Marty finally claps eyes on him. His eyes are clear, maybe too clear, but anything’s better than dead blank. 

“Hey.”

He raises his hand at Rust like a wave, for God knows what reason. 

“Hi, Marty.”

He’s in a wheelchair, gown and gauze covering most of the scars, but the edge of a star and the uppermost point of a devil’s nest are etched on his shoulder. He’ll bear these forever, is Marty’s next thought.

“New tattoos,” Rust murmurs, taking note of his gaze. “It’s just skin.” 

“Sure.”

“You drew the short straw, huh?”

“What’s that?”

He has to fight hard to get his eyes off Rust’s skin.

“Don’t imagine there was an eager queue of volunteers to keep vigil. Did see Lutz and Woodley pass by earlier, rubbernecking. Looked at me like I was a memory.”

“Well, Lutz’s got that lazy eye. I wouldn’t take it personally.”

Rust regards him in silence for a long beat, like he’s measuring.

“Not that I’m not grateful. Figures you’d be feeling pretty liberal with your pity right now, in spite of everything.”

The pity thing sticks in Marty’s craw, and not only because it’s wrong.

“What’s your problem?”

“I’m just stating things as they stand, Marty. Far as I can see them. Allowing for the fact I’ve been in a stone box for twenty days.”

The anger fades as fast as it came, the memory of that place setting an ache in his chest.

“You get told that, or were you counting the days?”

“There was a corner, left hand ceiling, where the light refracted. Figured it was from a loose piece of brickwork, somewhere on the opposite wall, but I never could see where. Measured out the days just fine.”

“What did he do to you?” Probably shouldn’t be asking, can’t stop.

“He was repeating a loop. That’s all. Same thing it always is.”

Rust’s tone hasn’t changed once, his voice a perfect monotone. Should pass the psych evaluation, at any rate.

He doesn’t press further. There are two doctors approaching from way down the corridor, one holding what has to be Rust’s notes, and he prepares to leave.

“Alright, I’m gonna leave you to it, let ‘em do their thing, but I’ll check back in–” but Rust gets a hold of Marty’s wrist and he looks down, startled. “What?”

The reply, when it comes, is jumbled syllables; Rust’s rigid, every inch of him changed as the doctors draw nearer. 

“What’d you say?”

“I’m not getting out of here,” Rust repeats, louder.

“How’s that?”

“They’re gonna put me under an involuntary psych hold and once I’m in they’ll never let me leave, not with my past.”

“No, it’s not that kind of place–”

“I know how this goes, man, I’ve been here before.”

His eyes are wild and he’s vibrating with fear, gripping Marty’s arm like he’s the last piece of driftwood from a sunken ship.

Marty holds up a warning hand to the doctors and they pause, huddling.

“Marty, please, fuck please don’t let them keep me. I can’t again–”

“Hey, it’s okay, I swear they’re not gonna keep you here, nobody’s trying to do that. Alright?”

Seeing Rust this animated is foreign; seeing him pleading goes beyond foreign. He’d say anything to get the terror out of those eyes. 

“It’s okay,” he repeats, and keeps on saying it, one hand cupped around the back of Rust’s neck, and Rust slumps like rags against him until he’s wheeled away behind a door marked “AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY”.

And Marty’s left standing, winded.


	5. Chapter 5

After he’s discharged, Marty goes back to the shitty too-bare apartment he’s been rattling around in since the split, and keeps busy.

He puts up a set of flat-pack shelves, fixes coat hooks into the back door, makes a start on fixing the leak under the sink, trying to think of anything but tunnels and branches and the whites of Childress’s wild eyes. 

But he needs more supplies than he’s got, and when he’s halfway out of the door, Maggie calls. 

“They’re letting him out. Rust.”

“What – just like that?”

“He wants to go home, they need the bed, no good reason to hold him.”

He’s not sure why this doesn’t sit right with him. Not sure what he expected.

“Great, then. That’s good.”

“Yeah.”

There are gaps around every word she says, and he knows why.

“Is he going now?”

“Not without a ride home.”

When he reaches the hospital Rust is already waiting in the parking lot, cigarette butts gathering at his feet. He’s wearing clothes that must be from the hospital Lost & Found, sweats and sneakers and an oversized Kenny Rogers T-shirt.

“Shit, I could’ve brought you some clothes,” he says as Rust swings himself into the passenger seat. “You look like a real troubled teenager.”

“Fuck you.”

“Just saying it like I see it. How you feeling?”

Rust takes his time responding. 

“Clean bill of health.”

That’s not exactly what Marty was asking, as if Rust doesn’t realise. He drives in silence for a while, trying to figure out how to re-approach.

“So… what’s the plan?”

“Generally speaking, I’ve never put much stock in making plans.”

“Don’t turn this into a fuckin’ philosophy lesson, alright,” Marty says mildly, though in actuality he’d give anything to hear Rust go off on a lengthy tangent right about now. Something in his hunched stance and choppy sentences feels more off than usual. 

“Plan is home. For now. Not thinking much beyond that.”

“You sure you don’t… I mean, I crashed at your place for long enough back in ’95, figure I owe you at least a few nights on the couch. If you want.”

And he realises that all along he’s just been assuming Rust will stay with him. Not go home. Not go back to that hellhole with a wall of corpse photos and twig sculptures to greet him.

“You sure?”

“Need some space,” is all Rust says, and Marty forces himself to bite back a dozen things. Hasn’t he had enough fucking space for a lifetime? Enough hours alone in the dark? 

But Rust doesn’t have on the kind of expression he can argue with. 

He pulls up at Rust’s place and watches him retreat towards the still-open door, and can’t shake the physical urge to pull him back. 

*~*

It takes less than a week for the fucking jokes to start. Marty’s welcomed back to the station like a hero, and it feels like ’95 all over again but hollow and sour. Rust goes unmentioned in Salter’s speech.

He could’ve stomached that, if he’d gone unmentioned elsewhere.

“Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving shit-heel,” is what he hears first, when he’s almost rounded a corner. He stops short at Geraci’s voice, holding his breath as Lambert and Grant laugh. 

“Christ, somebody had to say it.”

“Gotta figure – a psycho who’s only ever been interested in girls and little kids suddenly picks on a grown-ass man. What’s that say about what kind of a man that is?”

A snort.

“I always figured Cohle for a fag.”

“Well no shit, Lambert, you got eyes in your skull. Abducted, my ass – he went there by choice, probably enjoyed the hell out of whatever cock-sucking blood ritual they had going on.”

Marty steps out in front of them, lips drawn into a dead-straight line. 

“Not for nothin’, fellas, but when you get to talking like this you sound like you got problems.”

Grant and Lambert have their eyes lowered to the ground, but Geraci’s are leveled at Marty.

“Look, Marty, I don’t mean no disrespect to you or what you did. Great thing. Great work. State’s a safer place now because of you. But you and Cohle, you ain’t seen eye to eye for a while. Am I right?

“Don’t know. Are you?”

“Ain’t exactly a secret. That dust-up in the parking lot, sure seemed like you had your differences.”

“What’s your point?”

“You really gonna look me in the eye and tell me you think Cohle was there on police business?”

He moves fast, gets an elbow against Geraci’s windpipe and backs him hard into the wall. 

“You wouldn’t know real police work if it walked up and fucked you in the ass, Geraci, so I ever hear you talking about this again, any of this, it’ll be you in the hospital next.”

He walks away clenching and unclenching his fist, waiting for the red haze behind his eyes to lift.

*~*

He tries calling Rust. He picks up the first time, and they go around in a circle for a few minutes – Marty rambling, Rust monotone – before Marty offers to come over, and Rust declines. He doesn’t pick up again. 

After five days of this, he’s had enough. 

“You gonna make me invite myself in?” he asks, sixer in hand, after Rust opens the door and stares straight through him for a full minute. 

Rust beckons him in with the most leaden flourish possible. 

The place isn’t much improved. The empty beer cans add a few splashes of colour, at least. The wall of crime scene photographs and the like is gone – taken as evidence, he figures – but a few relics remain.

“I brought this back, by the way.”

He pulls out the ledger from his jacket, holds it out to Rust.

“It was still in my car, from before. When I, uh– That’s how I found you, at the Childress place. You’d written the address down in a ballpoint, I guess, left an impression in the next page. Couldn’t figure why you hadn’t just taken the whole thing with you, like always. Then I thought maybe you left it there as evidence for someone to find. Like maybe you knew you weren’t coming back, or you might not be.”

Rust fixes him with an expression he can’t quite read, and takes the ledger.

“Thanks.”

Well hell, that’s progress.

“So. How you been, Rust?”

“Same old,” Rust murmurs, stalking back across the darkened room to retrieve a bottle. Whiskey. Straight. “You want a drink?”

“Sure.”

Rust drinking right out of the bottle feels like cause for concern, but it’s not a concern he can bring himself to feel too keenly right now. He takes the glass from Rust, picks up a devil’s nest from the counter. 

“Still holding onto these, huh?”

“Why you here, Marty?”

“Look, if I thought you had some kind of teeming social calendar you had to get back to, I’d be more than happy to step aside. But since far as I can see you’re spending this evening getting real friendly with a bottle of Jack, I don’t figure I’m intruding.”

“Didn’t say you were. That still don’t explain why you’re here, after everything, still acting like you owe me something. People have short memories, but two months is a little shorter than I’d have figured even for you.”

He has to process for a second, disbelieving that Rust’s actually bringing this up, hinting around Maggie. Like he’s trying to get a rise out of him. 

“I haven’t forgotten. Believe me.”

“And yet here you are.”

Even by his usual standards, Rust looks like shit, his eyes underlined by black-purple crescents that look worse against his ashen skin. He’s at least halfway drunk, and Marty figures he’s been pretty consistently at that level for the last week. 

“You been sleeping?”

“What do you think?”

“They gave you pills, smart-ass. Sleeping shit, meant to make sure you actually get some shut-eye once in a blue moon. You taking them?”

“Last thing I need’s more fucking drugs. Spent three weeks out of my skull in that box, got enough sleep for a lifetime.”

As if he got anything like sleep. The weight of what Marty still doesn’t know about Carcosa, the unanswered questions he’s too chickenshit to ask. 

“You don’t look healthy,” he says, and it comes out quieter and sadder than he expected. 

“I don’t need your pity. I’d rather have your anger. Least that’s honest, which is a rare enough thing. That right hook, that was honest.”

“Okay, I’m worried about you. How’s that? I saw you cut half to shreds and tied up like a corpse, like a body you’d sketch in that fucking ledger. That changes things.”

“Compassion is a biological perversion. The illusion that man can love his neigbour, that his primal interest will not always be self-preservation, that the impulse to care can override the impulse to cull. It’s how society keeps itself from entropy, but it’s not serving us any, right here, not at all.”

Marty closes his eyes, actually counts down from ten.

“You are unbelievable,” he manages through gritted teeth. “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe your definition of humanity is a little… I don’t know, narrow? Willfully fucking ignorant? Like you’re too afraid to admit maybe you’re the sick one, for believing this little of people.”

“I’m not arguing with you, man. I’m not looking to stand in the way of whatever story you need to tell yourself today.”

“You know, you were always so keen to get up my ass about being easy on myself – seems to me in the world of Rust Cohle, you can fuck a man’s wife and somehow retain the moral high ground. In the world of Rust Cohle, you can get your life saved and still be an ungrateful son of a bitch, walk around the earth like your every breath’s a fucking burden.”

“I don’t recall ever asking you to save me, Marty.”

And something in that burns, and he’s done.

“Yeah, and I’m sure as shit starting to wish I hadn’t.”

The door doesn’t slam as hard as he’d like behind him. 

He drives home with his jaw locked, knuckle drumming out _fuck you fuck you fuck you_ on the wheel.


	6. Chapter 6

Four days later, on a rain-hewed Thursday night, he gets a call from the station. It’s Lutz.

“Cohle just got picked up along 55, walking against traffic. Brought him in but he was agitated, y’know, paranoid. Kept saying things that didn’t add up. Salter’s saying we’re gonna have to send him to Lafayette.”

“Shit. He on something?”

“Sure seems that way.”

But if the hospital get a hold of Rust, drug-induced isn’t the diagnosis they’re going to go with. Not with his history. 

“Can you stall Salter until I get over there?”

“Yeah, he knows.”

Salter is waiting for him at reception when he gets to the station, mouth set.

“This is the first and last time I’m doing this,” he opens, and Marty breathes an inward sigh of relief because he’s not going to have to fight.

“Believe me, I ain’t making a habit of it. Is he alright?”

“How the fuck would I know? Far as I’m concerned Cohle’s never been alright a day in his life.”

“By his standards, I’m saying. He on something?”

“Look, Marty, I’m not getting into this. Whatever this is, the two of you, him, I don’t get it and I don’t want to. I said it two months ago and I’m saying it again now – he don’t act right, he don’t sound right.”

“I know you didn’t exactly see eye to eye, but he’s not crazy. He’s just... I mean, shit, you know. Any one of us would be acting a little off in his shoes.”

Salter sighs. 

“Look, I can hand-wave this – it’s late, he had a drink too many and got lost, it’ll wash in the report. But if this happens again, he’s gotta go to Lafayette.”

“I get it. Thanks, Leroy.”

Sitting perfectly still in the corner of his cell, Rust looks just about the same as Marty last saw him, a shade paler maybe. Marty gets up close and looks at him, looks into his glassy gaze. 

“Rust. You know where you are?”

He crouches down to Rust’s level, snaps his fingers a couple of times in front of his eyes. Then realises he’s looking at something else, something Marty can’t see.

“Rust.”

Marty touches his shoulder and he blinks, returning. 

“Yeah?”

“Come on.”

He takes Rust by the arm, puts a guiding hand firmly against his shoulder blades. He feels like a coiled spring. 

Marty spends most of the drive home trying to figure out his next words, feeling like if he doesn’t approach this right Rust will bolt. He’s half expecting Rust to put up a fight when they arrive at Marty’s, but he’s either too out of it to notice or too far gone to care. 

Once they’re inside Marty double locks the door with a dim sense of relief, like at least he can contain this. 

“How long’s it been since you slept?” is what comes out, at the sight of Rust’s hollowed-out eyes in the moonlight. 

“It’s not sleep, what I get. There’s not a word for what happens when I close my eyes, now, and there’s sure as hell not a word I could use to make you understand.”

“Think there is a word for that. Nightmares,” Marty says, voice level and quiet, trying not to stir the air. “Or night terrors, maybe. And it’s to be expected, Rust.”

A hard exhale, no answer. 

“So, look, you were wrung out and spooked and you took something to try to get some sleep. I get it. Don’t blame you. What’d you take?”

No reply, and Rust paces the floor in a jagged oval, twitching more than walking.

“What’d you see?”

Pacing. 

“On the highway, in the patrol car, they said you were having some kind of hallucination, like a flashback, maybe. I don’t give a shit what you’re on, I just wanna know what this is.”

Pacing, and Rust shakes out his right arm in a single, sharp movement.

“Rust. Talk to me.”

“Don’t make out like you understand this,” he snaps, eyes dark. “We’re not on the same continent, you and me.”

“Okay–”

“You hear a couple stories, work a couple spooky cases and you think you know, you think you’re on a level. Things I’ve seen would strip your grey matter. You fucking amateur.” 

He sees the flimsiness of what Rust’s doing, the scrabbling for control. He’s not rising. No part of him feels anything like anger. 

“You want to feel like the bigger man, taking me in, taking me on, and that’s all fine so long as you don’t have to look. And you don’t want to know, nobody should know this, least of all those people like yourself who still want to believe the world is ours.” 

“Yeah?”

“What that place was. The blood, the semen, you imagine these things were the worst of it but they were life-signs, ways I knew I was still in my body.”

Marty nods, just enough for Rust to keep going.

“Whole days passed I swore I was a corpse, putrefying and not breathing but still just seeing, existing, preserved meat. They never tell you there’s a third stage, it doesn’t go life, death, there’s grey between those two and I was that, and there’s just no sense in pretending you walk the same earth I do. It’s a loop, and I was always in Carcosa, is what he said, and I still am.”

Another nod.

“Coming back to the world was meant to be a blessing, like I’d been saved, and all it is is more noise.”

Rust goes quiet soon after that, gaze darting all around the room like something hunted and he looks so small. And it’s clear to Marty, now, what he should have been doing all along.

“Come here,” he says, soft as he can, and puts his arms tight around Rust.

He’s like stone at first, bunched up in knots with no give to them, whole body quivering with unspent adrenalin. And it strikes him how Rust hasn’t felt safe a day in his life, not for a single second, and how bone-tired he has to be. 

Marty cups a hand to the nape of his neck and squeezes, and Rust gets weak against him after a while. He makes a sound like he’s suffocating and pulls back but Marty holds on, more sure of this than he’s been of anything in weeks. 

Rust cries then, almost silent but vicious, his whole body racked with it. His grip on Marty is so hard it hurts, like he’s forgotten what it’s like to have something to hold onto.

Marty doesn’t say anything. Just rubs one hand up and down Rust’s spine while he sobs and sobs, feeling every vertebrae through his shirt, feeling the pain shake from him like moisture.

After a while, Rust says “Marty” like an apology, voice raw, and Marty says “Yeah,” and then they’re silent again for a spell. 

“Come on,” he says eventually, one arm around Rust as he guides him towards the couch. Rust as good as collapses, slumping boneless against the couch arm, his head bowed. “Wait here.”

In the bedroom, Marty rifles through a half-unpacked box, the supplies he’d grabbed half-blind from the bathroom cabinet he and Maggie once shared. He’d been prescribed pills after his dad passed, after Maggie found him sleeplessly pacing the kitchen one night too many, and he’d only ended up needing a couple of doses to get him back on an even keel. They’d sure knocked him the hell out. 

“I’m gonna give you some sleeping pills,” he tells Rust when he returns, “and you’re gonna take them without comment. But I don’t know what the hell kind of drug interactions there could be with what you’ve already taken, so once again, you wanna tell me what that might be?”

Rust looks wearily up at him.

“Quaaludes, but they had to be cut with something. Hard to get the real thing now.”

“And I’m thinking you knew that when you bought ‘em, and you didn’t really give a shit.”

He wishes it didn’t bother him, this wilful fucking death wish of Rust’s. 

“Looking at you, you don’t look like a man who’s taken Quaaludes. Kind of the opposite.”

“Don’t exactly need you to educate me about narcotics, Marty.”

“There truly is no situation where you won’t be a smart-ass, is there?”

Rust shrugs, but his eyes look like bruises. And Marty shakes two pills into his hand, because right now his gut’s telling him Rust needs sleep above just about anything else, and it’s worth the risk. 

“You want some water?” he asks, not waiting for a response because there’s no way Rust isn’t dehydrated. He’s proved right when Rust chugs down the entire glass without pausing for breath, then slumps boneless against the arm of the couch, stretching out.

Even like this, Marty can feel the tension coming off him like energy, his eyes wide and his body still a live wire. 

“Just close your eyes, Rust,” he murmurs, squeezing his shoulder. “Don’t matter if you sleep, just get some rest.”

This much he knows from his own experience, there’s nothing like worrying about getting to sleep to guarantee you never will. 

But it doesn’t take long for Rust’s breathing to get low and even, and it’s a good few minutes before Marty dares to move.

He goes back into the bedroom and rummages around for a spare blanket, knowing it’s pointless. Not the kind of thing he’d thought of when he’d packed up two suitcases in a haze of red, just a few short hours after feeling the crunch of Rust’s bones in the parking lot. 

What he does find is his winter coat, barely used these past few years, and it’ll do. He drapes it over Rust before pulling up a chair next to the couch, thinking he’ll hover for a few minutes before heading to bed himself.

But the question mark in his head is too bold and glaring to ignore. And so he stays, and stays awake, checking Rust’s pulse every half hour and listening hard to his breathing. 

Only when the morning comes, and light’s pooling around the half-closed shutters, does he finally let himself doze off.


End file.
